PTA & Bennett Miller Text Over How Much Digital Sucks, Apparently

Weird quick late non-news-related update we found amusing.

Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune is wrapping up his coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival and today he had an interesting name-drop in his writing.

In talking with filmmaker Bennett Miller about his much-buzzed-about new film Foxcatcher, which earned him the Best Director award at Cannes this year, the conversation turned to another famous winner of that same award.

Miller clearly knows how to work a roomful of media types without acting like a showboater or coming off like a man undergoing a root canal. He's a low-key fellow who sweats the details of his projects. We talked for a bit last weekend, and what he really wanted to talk about wasn't "Foxcatcher" but the drastically limited avenues of shooting on film, and projecting it, in the digital age.

In Toronto Miller told me straightforwardly, "I think we were better off as filmmakers 100 years ago." He does not prefer shooting digitally. He doesn't like the postproduction process as much now. And the clinical crispness of digital projection bugs him.

Miller picked up his iPhone midconversation and started fishing around for some recent texts. Look here, he said. Read these. They were from Paul Thomas Anderson, whose latest film, "Inherent Vice," plays the New York Film Festival next month.

The texts picked up a conversation Miller and Anderson had earlier the same day, about the inferiority of digital. The vitriol came through in every unpunctuated word.

No direct quotes from either PTA or Miller's texts were lifted for the piece, but it would be nice to think they contained emoji equations like these:

'Vice' Rumored For NYFF; More Insider Reactions Revealed

Paul Thomas Anderson at the New York Festival, 1997.

With Inherent Vice's theatrical release just a hair under five months away, questions have begun to percolate as to where ( or if ) the film will have a festival premiere. The Cannes Film Festival back in May proved an unrealistic mesh with the film's post-production schedule, with an anonymous source at Hollywood Elsewhere suggesting PTA was more comfortable with a late summer premiere at Telluride, Venice, and/or Toronto film festivals. Any of those festivals could still prove to be where PTA chooses to unveil the new movie, but according to new reporting from Hollywood Elsewhere, a slight curveball may be coming in the near future, with an exclusive 2014 New York Film Festival premiere in the works:

There's convincing chatter about Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, David Fincher's Gone Girl, and [Christopher] Nolan's Interstellar debuting at the New York Film Festival, although the most recent buzz says that Interstellar could play Telluride first. But the other two are thought to be NYFF exclusives.

PTA notably brought both Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love to the New York Film Festival in 1997 and 2002, respectively, so it is not much of a stretch to conceive that Vice could play there as well.

Hollywood Elsewhere also reported yesterday that word about Vice is continuing to reverberate within the industry:

Last night I spoke to a friend who knows a woman who recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice... Her initial nutshell reaction was that she "didn't get it" because...well, how could I know? But one of the apparent blockages was that it doesn't adhere to a precise narrative through-line that led anywhere in particular (i.e. no third-act payoff). But then she started to understand it a bit more when she began to think about it the next day. A film that's more about the journey than the destination. I told this guy that three months ago an industry friend who'd seen Vice had described it in a similar way, calling it "brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way"as well as "Lebowski-esque"

We'd say that sounds just like PTA.

The 52nd annual New York Film Festival will run September 26 - October 12.
The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival will run August 29 - September 1.
The 71st annual Venice Film Festival will run August 27 - September 6.
The 39th annual Toronto International Film Festival will run September 4 - September 14.

Not too much longer and we'll know which -- if any -- of these festivals will score an Inherent Vice slot in their lineup.

In the meantime...

IV: 157 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
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